Trust Beats Expertise | Joshua I Wilson | Growing Money Podcast

In this episode of Growing Money, I sit down with Dr. Joshua Wilson to explore the psychology behind money, trust, marketing, and business decisions. Joshua explains why expertise, credentials, and technical knowledge are not enough to earn someone’s trust. Before people evaluate your financial plan, service, or business offer, their brains are already deciding whether they feel safe, understood, and comfortable with you.

We discuss neurobehavioral finance, emotional decision-making, financial anxiety, and why people often feel first and justify their choices later. Joshua also reveals why successful entrepreneurs and high earners can remain deeply insecure even after achieving financial success. More money may improve the numbers, but it does not automatically create peace, confidence, or emotional stability.

We also explore what separates great financial advisors from technically skilled ones, why generic marketing makes businesses invisible, and how trust becomes the first real sale. This conversation is a powerful reminder that people do not simply buy information, they choose the person they trust to deliver it.

Has achieving more ever made you feel safer, or did it simply give you more to worry about?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Well, marketing really starts too late. Um, most people start with tactics, uh, a website, a funnel, LinkedIn posts, you know, emails, ads, whatever. Um, and those things help. Okay. First off, what is marketing? Marketing is how you get your sign, your message out. So those are distribution tools. They're how you touch the market. So they're, but what are they doing? What are they spreading? They're supposed to spread a signal. So the real question is not what, how am I going to get a message out there? The real question is, what am I getting out there? What signal are these tools spreading? So if the underlying message is generic, then better marketing, defined as getting better at getting in front of people, right? Better marketing just spreads generic faster. And so that's why you um a really smart, capable, I mean, so Sean, I've worked with brilliant advisors who are amazing at what they do, but then they spend a ton of money and they still blend in because they use borrowed language from the market. They use what sounds professional and credible, then they copy what their competitor's doing because it sounds like it fits in. They use that same ideal client language, the same pain points, the same we care so much more than everybody else, and the same customized stuff. And they use everything that everybody's saying. And now again, AI makes all that um scalable and cheap and easy to produce. So it's not, can you publish? Everybody can publish. The bar is now can the right person feel the difference quickly and therefore decide to keep paying attention to you. And that requires a much deeper layer than marketing. It requires knowing what is actually marketable about you.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Welcome back to the Growing Money with Sean Trace Podcast. I've got an awesome guest with me today. Yeah. Um, if you look at his resume, you might assume he came from the Polish side of finance, an award-winning advisor, former CEO, like a firm builder, PhD in vertical finance, billions in revenue, multiple businesses built and sold, but that's not the real story. The real story starts on a farm in rural Alabama with no money, uh, a family that had no money growing up, no industry connections, and no obvious path into the rooms he would eventually enter. Like, can you tell people a little bit more? Um, who are you, man? Besides that, this cool resume. Who are you?

SPEAKER_01 2:47

Man, um, it's it's funny because I I definitely resonate much more with the farm kid from rural Alabama than I do with probably the resume itself. You know, I grew up with a great family that that cared a lot and you know, kind of grew up singing in church and working on the farm and doing those kind of close to the earth types of things and close to people. Um, but you know, when I so when I first got into the into the business world, it was I wasn't prepared for it at all. You know, and I think a lot of us, you know, I'm in my early 40s and a lot of us, especially millennial types, and we kind of heard this, just go to college and then you'll learn and and you get credentialed, and then you get into the right rooms, and and it's all about what you know, and it's all about what you learned. And I think I kind of really bought into that, that that education, and don't get me wrong, I'm I'm very pro-educ, but that just what you know was really the key to everything. And not that it doesn't have value, but um, what I've learned is that basically that my humanity matters and understanding where that comes from, understanding the signal that I give off, understanding why certain people connect with me and other people don't. Um, that really, you know, people are making decisions about us at a pre-rational level. And it was getting into business that really taught me that from the from the from the bottom up.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

I love that. And I I gotta rewind there for people that are listening, we already have flashed it on screen, but for people listening, I've got the uh Dr. Joshua Wilson with me today. And, you know, I I feel blessed because you've got such a diverse experience, you know, and like one of the things too is like I also have, you know, like this very varied background. And I think that there's a richness to it when you have a diverse background, because you know, I can sit there and think back to days where I didn't have a lot. My parents always did the best they could. I grew up all over the U.S. My dad is English, my mom's American, and we moved a lot for my dad's work. And I mean, I lived in North Carolina, Tennessee, Idaho, Southern California, Northern California, uh, Massachusetts, uh, Texas, uh, man, all over the place. And one of the things that I've done. Dude, I have, and now I'm living in Southeast Asia. And like, one of the things that I found was that all of those different chapters kind of built who I am, and that there were these experiences allowed me to see the way people do things. And it was, it was one of the best education like steps I could have was just to be out there and see people. But, you know, I want to ask you because you started as an advisor with no book, no base salary, and no built-in trust. And you had to start with from zero, but like from zero, but you still had this wealth of experience. Like that was your foundation. But what did building from zero teach you about human behavior that most financial experts miss?

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Well, I think the biggest thing from building from zero is just that trust is not automatic just because you know what you're talking about. Yeah. We tend to rely so much on our knowledge and our professionalism and our qualifications. Like I deserve to be here. I've earned the right to be here, therefore I should be respected, I should be trusted. And so, not having some polished path to the industry, I found myself sitting across from strangers and hey, I'm qualified to be here, but then I've got to figure out why anyone would trust me with something, especially as personal as their money. And that changes how you see people. You know, a textbook can teach you about biases, it can tell you about loss aversion and all these things that we talk about in behavioral science. Um, and that matters, but when your paycheck depends on whether another human being believes you, you learn something deeper. People are not just evaluating information, they're evaluating safety and they're doing it at a pre-conscious level. I mean, yeah, um, they're asking questions that they're not saying out loud, and they're not even consciously asking these questions because they're getting impressions of these things that are happening at a pre-conscious level. You know, will I feel stupid here? Are they trying to sell me? Do they understand me? Can I trust this person? Does this person feel familiar? Does this person feel comfortable? And that's what a lot of financial experts miss. They think the job is to be right and to have the right information. And yes, being right matters, but being right's not enough. You have to be trusted. And it's true in finance, business, marketing, leadership, whatever it is. If people don't feel safe enough to listen, then your expertise never gets a chance to help them. It doesn't survive that pressure layer where your information actually meets the market.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

I love that because one of the things that I think is so important is that you have to, the job of a financial expert that's working with people is to make people feel safe. Like you really do have to help them feel a degree of safety even when they are not in a safe place. You know, you have no emergency fund. That's not a safe thing to play safe place to be, but you can feel safety knowing that you have the tools to create one. You can feel safety knowing that you have the path to kind of write your ship. It's like, you know, someone's on a boat that is sinking underwater. You don't want to tell them, hey, it's it's okay. It is okay. You know, you can sit there and go, we've got you. We've got a plan to get you off the boat. You can get in the water a little bit. It ain't gonna be fun, but you got the life jacket on, and we're gonna pull you into the boat and then we're gonna figure out the next steps, you know? Um, but I think that if you can have that plan and you can kind of, I mean, like, because money is emotional, you know, and I think that it's really that you have to sit there and work with people. But I want to like on getting their emotions in check. I want to ask you this though, because um, you know, when people are looking for that person who can help them feel safe, who can help them uh make the right decisions. Like, I want to ask you, like, why do people choose one advisor or business or coach or product over another when the options look so similar on paper?

SPEAKER_01 9:27

Yeah, people usually choose based on a felt sense of fit before they can explain it logically. And this is probably one of the biggest errors that I see people make is well, just ask your people why they hired you. Just ask. Just ask them. Well, okay, there will be some overlap and correlation with the truth, with the with some of your people if you ask enough people. But you just gotta know statistics and you got to know people. And um ultimately the problem is is that people are rationalizing. Like I don't really, I it's hard for me to get in that position before my transformation, before, before you change, help me change my life, before you put me in this great position, before you did your service about where I was at before. I'm where I'm at now. And so what I do is I search for an explanation. And we're deciding on a pre-conscious level. And then when I've got to explain it, I'm going to want to give something that makes sense to me. So this feeling that's happening deep, deep in what we call the lizard brain, for to be playful about it. Um, it has to be pushed up into the prefrontal cortex and translated into speech. And so I've got to grasp for something that is going to make sense for me. We don't really want to just say it resonated. We want to say, well, he was a certified financial planner and he said he was a fiduciary and all these complicated words that we may not even really understand. Um these credentials matter, but it, but, but the um, but it's those things often get overlooked by logic. It doesn't mean logic doesn't matter. Logic matters, credentials matter, process matters, results matter, all that stuff happens. But people are deciding at a pre-conscious level whether they are even going to engage. And, you know, Sean, you're, I know you see this a lot in your in your lot of work, is information is easier than ever to produce. This is something we're actively all of us are dealing with is AI can can seem credible and professional and give you an average level of competence very, very quickly. So anyone could put information out there. The real question now is who do you want to get your information from? And that is happening at a pre-conscious level. Who do I want to listen to? Who can I, well, am I willing to give my attention to? Because the information is free now. We have changed from a world when I started in the industry, Sean, where we kept the information. You had to come to us to get the information. And I came into the industry right as the internet was really getting, you know, I started in 2007. So the internet is getting people are actually Googling and learning, and uh the online trading and things are starting to take off. But when you're, if you were in the 80s, 90s, you were, you, you had to go to a professional. Now we're bombarded with information. People are just throwing it at us, screaming at us. We can, everybody can market. So everybody's telling us this stuff, and our brains adjust. And so we just um we keep more information out, right? We raise the barrier to what can even enter our brain. So we're deciding who are we gonna pay attention to at a pre-conscious level that has nothing to do with the information, because the information's everywhere. We just who do we want to get it from?

SPEAKER_00 12:43

I think that that's one of the things that I try to talk to people about a lot. Because if you're gonna come and get a meal, right? And you are wanting to eat healthy, you're gonna really consider where you're getting your food from. You're gonna consider the source, you're gonna consider the ingredients, you're gonna consider, hey, is this junk food or is this something that's uh a little bit healthier? Because if it's not, you're gonna sit there and look at it and go, this probably isn't the best for me. Like I could be doing something that maybe is a little bit more healthy, right? But one of the things that I think is when we're consuming content, people just take whatever it. Like, well, this is in front of me. Let's see what we got. And if you think about that, and you were doing that with food, you would very quickly recognize that it's not nourishing you. You would very quickly recognize that it's not helping you grow in a healthy way. But we don't tend to notice that with um with the content we're consuming. We just kind of go, well, you know, it is what it is. It's win here, and boom, we eat it, we get that dopamine kick, yeah, and then we move on. But like, it ain't helping, you know, it's not helping at all. And I think that we have to start being more discerning of what we're consuming in the content sphere, you know, because yeah, it is just as, you know, like bad for us. And with finance stuff, it's actually downright dangerous if you're consuming the wrong type of content, you know, like people telling you, hey guys, you know, I'm gonna tell you the one stock that you should put 100% of your money in. If anybody says that crap, man, run for the hills. But I see people saying that on Instagram and TikTok. You know, people are telling you that this is the way that you're gonna get rich. Well, that's one way. One person did it, and it might not work all the time, and it might not work for you, you know?

SPEAKER_01 14:33

Yeah, and and I I I'll say one thing. I agree with you that we should all be working to be more discerning on these things. Yes, absolutely. At the same time, we who are communicating, we who are marketing, we who are have services, we really can't expect people to do that. We have to, we have to expect that they are going to be humans. And when everyone sounds the same, the buyer has to make a decision. We're forcing them to go into the price comparitons, convenience, referral source, all these things that it require them to compare and require them to process. We really don't want to process. We're taught we should, but we really don't want to. We want to rationalize. And, you know, when you were talking about the the different content creators that we're that we're listening to, a big determinant of the information that ends up coming into my head, into your head, depends on who you chose to listen to, right? We didn't, you don't actually start with the content and then decide who you're gonna listen to based on what they're saying. You decide based on who it is, right? They're getting you, they're hooking you. It's the person, it's how they communicate, it's the the feelings that you get from them. And so communication can't just be reduced to words. Yes, words matter, obviously words matter, but it's not just as simple as words. People are the problem is not just people are irrational, it's that they are trying to reduce uncertainty very quickly, and they take shortcuts to that. And that shortcuts, those shortcuts lead them down paths that are listening to those people that you're talking about, because they didn't start with, well, I'm not gonna listen to someone who says X. No, they're getting down the path, listen to that person, and then suddenly they're hearing X and you begin to hear it and repeat it, and it starts to make sense.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

Right. Oh man, that's so true. But that leads to my next question, too, because you know, businesses, smart business owners spend money on marketing and still sound like everyone else sometimes. Why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_01 16:47

Well, marketing really starts too late. Um, most people start with tactics, uh, a website, a funnel, LinkedIn posts, you know, emails, ads, whatever. Um, and those things help. Okay. First off, what is marketing? Marketing is how you get your signal, your message out. So those are distribution tools. They're how you touch the market. So they're, but what are they doing? What are they spreading? They're supposed to spread a signal. So the real question is not what, how am I going to get a message out there? The real question is, what am I getting out there? What signal are these tools spreading? So if the underlying message is generic, then better marketing, defined as getting better at getting in front of people, right? Better marketing just spreads generic faster. And so that's why um a really smart, capable, I mean, Sean, I've worked with brilliant advisors who are amazing at what they do, but then they spend a ton of money and they still blend in because they use borrowed language from the market. They use what sounds professional and credible, and they copy what their competitor's doing because it sounds like it fits in. They use that same ideal client language, the same pain points, the same we care so much more than everybody else, the same customized stuff. And they use everything that everybody's saying. And now again, AI makes all that um scalable and cheap and easy to produce. So it's not, can you publish? Everybody can publish. The bar is now can the right person feel the difference quickly and therefore decide to keep paying attention to you. And that requires a much deeper layer than marketing. It requires knowing what is actually marketable about you, about the voice that's getting out there before you amplify. Because marketing is not going to save your average signal. It can only make your average signal louder, which, if you've got big budget and you can paper the street and you can work win the world, the war of familiarity, by all means, you can do that, but it's expensive. And most business owners aren't going to be able to win the war of uh what I call the war of CAC, which is client acquisition cost. If you can afford to spend the most to get a client, you're gonna be fine. But is that the is that the the war you want to compete in?

SPEAKER_00 19:19

Right. Because it's like there are people that have endless budgets, and you have to think about what's worth your time to put money into, you know, and it makes me think about because I I think that sometimes people are saying the wrong things. And you know, and um one of the things that you said that was interesting to me is like there was this statement about money is emotional, but so is growth. And I wanted to ask about that, because that to me is fascinating. Like, what do money decisions reveal about how people make business decisions? Because you know, you had been talking about like ad spend and such, but like what makes people do the things that they're gonna do?

SPEAKER_01 20:01

Yeah. So money is one of the clearest places that we can watch human behavior because not of what it is, but but what it touches. It touches safety, it touches status, it touches freedom, it touches control and your family and your identity, and of course, your fears. Um, but and those same patterns show up in business. So the same brain that will panic sell during a market drop will also panic abandon a marketing strategy because it underperformed for two weeks. Yeah. And it's the same brain that holds a bad investment too long because it does not want to admit a loss. It will keep funding a bad business idea because the idea of walking away feels like like failure, right? So business growth is full of uncertainty. And so you don't know if the campaign will work, you don't know if the market will respond. You don't know if the buyer will care. You don't know if the thing that you built um will be adopted. So people, so we we reach for control. And when we're reaching for control, we tend to overreact, we tend to copy others, we tend to change things too soon, and and so we end up confusing all of this activity with with product uh with with progress. And I think that that's why you know these decision patterns, and that's what really behavioral science is, particularly behavioral economics, um, and that is these decision patterns. How do people predictably make irrational decisions and under what emotional constraints or emotional stimuli create causes people to make these? Very predictable errors in how we're looking at the world. That none of us, no matter how smart or how rational we pride ourselves or how knowledgeable we pride ourselves in being, we still get pulled into this. And it doesn't matter how smart you are, because by the way, you still have constraints about how much attention do you have in a day. When you say, like, what is Joshua like? If I'm honest with you, it's well, talk to me at 10 p.m., talk to me at 6 a.m., talk to me at 3 p.m., talk to me, you know, after a long trip. All of these, these are all Joshua and they're all true about who I am. But how I behave with these emotional decisions, and um, it's gonna tell you a lot. And so because money touches all of these different things, understanding why people make decisions and what um the various contexts which they're making decisions, that's gonna help us understand why people make decisions on business, um, on money, anything else.

SPEAKER_00 23:04

I love that, man. And to me, it makes so much sense because you know, it gives such a great context. But I wanted to ask you this too, because you say people feel first and justify later. How does that show up when someone is deciding who to trust with their money, their business, or their future?

SPEAKER_01 23:21

Yeah. Um so people make a felt decision first, and then we build the explanation afterwards. So we may say something like, um, the timing was right, which is partially true, right? I like their process, whatever. All those things can be true. But underneath that, there's usually something that happened earlier. They felt safe. They felt seen, they felt understood. There's a reason you got to the point. I mean, this is also the reason why you get to a point and you hear, well, let me think about it. Why are we thinking about it? Have we not, what's the point of this is thinking about it. Like, no, they're gonna feel about it because we built an expectation of our in our head about what we were going to, what we're where were we gonna be. And we didn't have that confirmation of feeling safety or feeling seen or feeling understood. I got the information, but the information is often coming from an expert, and I'm not an expert. And so I've got some translation. I'm already kind of feeling a little unsafe. And so they um the feeling becomes this feeling or lack of getting the feeling becomes the soil that these logical reasons, these things we think are logical, grow out of. And that's why these first impressions matter so much, not because people are shallow, but because the brain is trying to resolve uncertainty quickly, quickly, very quickly, instantaneously. So before someone trusts you with their money or their company or their future, whatever, they're trying to answer a deeper question. Can I put weight on this person? And that happens before the spreadsheet. It happens before the proposal, it happens before you've discussed fees, it happens before you've got into pitch deck. Um, you know, Sean, I'll give you an example that this is the the little story that kind of really changed my life in the business. So, you know, I grew up on a farm rural Alabama, went and got a degree in religious studies, Sean. So worked for a church for a year, and then I started in the business, had to get a real job, and um I did what everybody told me to do. I read all the books, I got the designations, I went to get another degree, and I'm learning all the products and all the pitches, and I'm studying sales and overcoming objections and all of these things that you've got to know. And there's two things I can do. It's work hard, that farm boy attitude, and then I that was it. I can work hard, work hard, and I can learn something. Work because I work hard enough to learn. And so I was I was always grinding it out, trying to just like prove I belonged. And that was probably part of my upbringing too, is prove I belong in this world and prove I can, I can hang here. And then one day, uh, a man and his wife, prospects, walked into a meeting, and he said, Hey, we uh we Googled you and we saw that graduation speech that you gave. Well, I was that was when I was 22, you know, which was a few years ago. And they began to talk to me about it. And 25 minutes later, he looked over at her and she nodded, and he looked back and he said, Well, I think we want to work with you. We just have a couple of questions. They asked me about fees and that sort of thing, and they did paperwork right there. And I thought, okay, this is probably the best case situation. This is the easiest sale I've ever had. Um, but I want more of that. What happened here that made these people decide they wanted to work with me? It's like, is he professional? Is he qualified? Great. But it was all about what weight can I put on this person? Do I trust them? Do I feel comfortable with them? And so all of that was happening before we got into are we qualified? What's the proposal? What is the time? Those things were the confirmation because they were choosing the person. And, you know, it would be easy for someone to dismiss this and say, well, everybody's not like that. Yes and no. Just that's like saying that everybody doesn't eat 5,000 calories a day, or everyone doesn't eat 1,000 calories a day. Most people are eating 2,500 calories a day or something like that. So to say that, well, that was an extreme case, yes, that was an extreme case, but it taught me that this matters to everyone. And so this should be a big part of your plan is how do I create this resonance? And how can I help people to understand that they can put weight on me, that this is not something that they need to go with just a logical explanation. They have to understand everything. Logic usually explains the decision, but it rarely starts the decision. People do not just buy the facts, they buy the feeling that the facts are safe in your hands. And before anyone is evaluating your offer, they are evaluating your steadiness.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

So the first sale is not the product. The first sale is trust.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

People are not really just asking, is this true? They ask, can I trust the person saying it?

SPEAKER_00 28:52

I think that one of the things that you nailed right there is there's lots of things that you nailed right there. But like, this is what I tell people all the time. When people come to me and say, hey, Sean, I want to make video content, and I say, What should I be doing? And I said, Show people who you are. Get them to understand you and why they should even care what you say. Because like there's a lot of people out there sharing a lot of information. Why is yours even relevant for them? You know, for me, you know, it's it's like I share stories about my family. I share content about people I care about. I show my wife, I show my daughter, I show what I go through every day for my wife's content, her music. We share, you know, the people that she, you know, share stories about our family again, because why should we? They have so many options right now. People need to figure out there's a reason to even trust you. Why would they even trust you? You know? And so I love what you're saying there, man. And I wanted to ask you another question because I had this, you know, most people think great advisors just manage investments. What do great advisors actually manage when a family or a business owner is under pressure?

SPEAKER_01 30:06

Yeah, it's definitely a lot more than investments. Um, yeah, kind of comes back to the core of what I said before is uncertainty. Because that's essentially what all of this comes down to. All of this brain math is looking for certainty. That's why familiarity matters. But that's also why, from a certain angle, why novelty matters, because you got to get it to get somebody's attention. So they're managing uncertainty, which means they're managing fear. Also, with money comes complications. Um, a great philosopher once said, Mo money, mo problems. Um, they what rapper that was, but anyway, um uh they're they're managing decision fatigue. They're managing tension within a family. And these trade-offs that they're helping people talk through, they have emotional weight. So when they're managing a room, when money makes people act less like themselves, the the portfolio is just the visible part, but the invisible part, the invisible part is often where the real value is. Because when when markets fall, a chart doesn't make them feel better. Even though the chart is technically where the most truth is. They need someone who can keep them from turning temporary fear into permanent damage. And like you take an example of like when somebody is selling a business, yeah, they need tax planning, absolutely. But they also need help with their identity because when it's like when you've been a financial professional and you get in a conversation that's so obvious that they need your help. And it's so obvious that it's well, if this does person doesn't hire me this week, they're hiring somebody else because surely they're hiring somebody. That's so obvious. It would be like a you feel like you're in a position where you're a physician that somebody walks in with a with a knife in their shoulder and you're like, yeah, that's a big problem. Yeah, I agree, it's a big problem. I can take that out for you. Yeah, it needs to be taken out. Okay, well, anyway, I'm gonna go leave and talk and think about it, talk to my wife. Right. And I'm probably gonna go see a couple more doctors. And you call them on the next week and they're like, Yeah, the the the blade is still there. And my wife and I have talked about it, and I've seen two other doctors, and guy, you're bleeding. That's how it feels at times when you're when you're when you talk to people in finance. When it's so obvious that you're selling this business and you need tax planning, why aren't you getting it? Why it's because they need help with identity sometimes. What they're putting off with this decision, it's not that you're not qualified or that they don't see it's a problem. What they're dealing with is who am I now?

SPEAKER_02 33:15

Who am I now, Sean? That the thing that I've built my life and my identity, the thing I've built my identity on, it's now gone. Now what?

SPEAKER_01 33:32

You know, when a family has wealth, they don't just need asset allocation. They need communication, they need stewardship, they need somebody else to carry weight in the room, somebody who can help them make decisions without every conversation becoming a quiet power struggle. Right. Everything being a challenge to identity or status within the family. And so, yeah, listen, um, any if we if we define great advisor with technical skill, okay, let's just say that's our temporary definition of great advisor is someone who has extreme technical skill. But great advisor doesn't mean that they bring emotional steadiness. You could technically be elite, but emotionally be average. So a great, my definition of a great advisor would be that somebody that can help people make better decisions when their nervous system wants relief even more than it wants truth. So a great advisor doesn't just manage money, they manage the room when people make when money makes people emotional. And you're really not earning your keep until people are emotional, because when people are calm and rational, that's easy. Then it's just, hey, one plus one equals two. Great. But when the room gets emotional and you status, hierarchy, identity, when these things start becoming the unstated needs, you have to have the experience and the understanding and the emotional um steadiness to carry that room when there's a point where identity is the issue and you can't just stick it in their face in front of their family. That's the sensitivity of being a great advisor.

SPEAKER_00 35:29

It's interesting too, because uh I am curious about the entrepreneur side, but like, why do successful entrepreneurs and the higher earners still feel financially or professionally unsafe even after they've made it?

SPEAKER_01 35:40

You know, success changes numbers, and you think that the numbers are gonna change your brain chemistry.

SPEAKER_02 35:49

Doesn't. It doesn't change your nervous system. And we assume that once we make more money, sell a company or get a title or a degree or hit some sort of goal that we're gonna feel safe.

SPEAKER_01 36:08

Sometimes they do to an extent, but quite frankly, the the research and my practical experience confirms that the goal moves because now there's more to lose. Now more people are watching. Now there's more responsibility, and now I'm comparing myself to different things. So there's more pressure to move, there's more pressure to move the success um to prove there's more pressure to prove that this success was not a fluke, and then it's like, is this real? So because if someone built their success from scarcity, from pressure, from survival. And and by the way, I'm I'm gonna say this when I'm talking when I'm saying this, I'm talking about myself, Sean. I mean, this is this is me understanding to process myself so I can really relate to this on a deep level. When you built your success from scarcity and pressure and survival, and you know, you learn how to achieve. But learning how to achieve is not the same thing as learning how to rest. And that's a real problem. So there are people with money who still feel like one mistake could expose them, or entrepreneurs who sell a business and still feel behind, or high earners who look successful, but internally they feel like they're always trying to outrun something. And that's why money it's not just math. Money ends up becoming a mirror.

SPEAKER_02 37:57

It shows you what you really believe about safety and control and your worth and freedom and your identity.

SPEAKER_01 38:11

And if you don't deal with that layer, more money does not create more peace. Sometimes it creates a more expensive version of anxiety.

SPEAKER_02 38:26

And I think at the end of the day, there are so many people that think that they're building wealth, but they're not. They're just building a more luxurious cage for themselves.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

I think that's a more luxurious cage for themselves, is a perfect way to describe it because there are so many people that they dig, they dig, they chase, they chase, they climb the ladder, but when they get to a higher point, they find that they're still exactly where they were at. There's a great uh in the Tao Tijing, uh, which is a Taoist text written by Lao Tzu, the uh Taoist philosopher. He's got this line that says, whether you go up the ladder or down the ladder, your position is still unstable. And the idea being it's it's not about going up or down. It's about if you're unstable at a certain point, you're always gonna be unstable. Whether you have 10 million or $10, you know, either of them, you're gonna still have the same things inside that you haven't processed. I had a family member who became extremely wealthy, and that wealth did not help them because they still had the habits, they still had all those things, and you know, all the things that caused them to have problems when they had no money, they still had the same problems when they had lots of money. And I had this discussion with someone, and again, I it comes back to the how do you view things? Going back to the tool, you know, you can take a knife and make great food. You can also take a knife and cut yourself or cut someone else. And I think that that's one of the things, too, is at the end of the day, I think what advisors are doing, what you know, people that are in the financial field should be doing is working with people on how to manage a knife. You know, because it is a great thing that you have this powerful tool that can transform your life, your family's life, the lives of the people around you if you know how to use it. Just like a knife can cook food for yourself for other people. You can open a restaurant, it's powerful. But if you don't know how to use it, you'll end up cutting yourself because the challenges are there about how to use this powerful thing, if that makes any sense.

SPEAKER_01 40:54

No, it makes makes all the sense in the world. You know, at the end of the day, you know, we we we feel like the the money is gonna be this sort of scoreboard or this comfort. And oftentimes it ends up just being, you know, the it doesn't create the peace. It doesn't do the things we thought it was gonna do. Sometimes instead of money giving you peace, it just gives you anxiety about more expensive furniture. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 41:26

Uh it more expensive furniture, which is true, man. It's so true. Like, you know, what was it? Um the uh the idea of what was it, lifestyle creep is such a thing. And you see it. Like people have not stepped out of the spot that they were at before, you know. So you had a small apartment and a cheap car and you were stressed. Now you have a nice apartment and a nicer car and you're still stressed. The stress is constant because you're in the same, you're on the same hamster wheel, you know?

SPEAKER_01 41:56

I'll tell you what, I don't want there's certain things that I just I don't want the nicest stuff. I I've I've done nice sunglasses and I can't keep them. If I if you give me a pair of sunglasses you got at the gas station, I'll never lose them. Right. But there's something about there's something about expensive sunglasses. There's luxuries I want, I like Sean, but for some reason, just the anxiety of the sunglasses. I don't want them. Give me the cheap ones.

SPEAKER_00 42:21

Right. I'm with you, man. I think, but it's also because there's a clarity about what's important. You know, and I think that that's one of the things that I I've realized and had to tell myself um when enough is enough, what is the enough for you? Because if you can become clear on what enough is for you, you know, you will be much happier in the long run.

SPEAKER_01 42:45

And and I'll I'll say one of the things that I try to keep reminding myself, Sean, is that like, why am I doing something that I would not enjoy the journey? Right? You know, like that this should be about the day-to-day. This shouldn't be about just getting to the end, because by the way, the end typically feels like a little bit of a letdown. Like, why do I keep doing new challenges? Well, apparently, Sean, I kind of like challenges. I must, I'm, I must like challenges because I don't choose the easy route. So I must be enjoying this. And I I am. And when I stop and tell myself, hey, why are you doing this? Well, you must enjoy it. Otherwise, because there's a different path. There is an easier path than this. So enjoy it. It's gonna pass either way. Right.

SPEAKER_00 43:38

Where can people go? Um if if someone wants to learn more about you and what you do and how you help people, where can people go and find out about you and what you do for people? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 43:50

There's a couple of places, Sean, depending on how you like to interact with the world. Um, there is a YouTube channel as well that you can link. Um got a lot more long form going to be coming out of that channel actually this this coming month. Um so my YouTube channel there, Dr. Joshua Wilson. Um I I'm most active on LinkedIn. So if you're the kind of person that likes to frequently get those kind of micro lessons and learning about this type of stuff, uh, I produce a lot of content on on LinkedIn as well. My website is uh www.nubify.com, N-E-U-B-E-F-I.com. Uh strange name, but it actually has a meaning. Uh Nubi stands for neurobehavioral finance and is essentially that study of um not just human behavior and how it affects financial decisions and the decision who to pay attention to, but also the neurological mechanism behind those things of what's leading into these things. Um and uh yeah, my website uh there and the YouTube, LinkedIn. I'm on the other social medias as well. You'll see me on Instagram and uh and Facebook and so forth. So wherever you consume, you'll be able to uh do it fine.